So why hadn’t he called the police? The timer on his moral high ground had long since counted down. He might not be down in the trenches with Jenn and Hendricks, but at this point he was every bit as guilty. How far was he willing to let this go if it meant finding out what Tate knew? Where was the line?

He felt his phone buzz and put down his binoculars. He was expecting a call from ACG at some point. He’d called on Monday to ask if he could keep the car for an extra week, maintaining his ruse that he was back in the DC area. George’s assistant had said he’d get back to Gibson, but there’d been no word since. Apparently ACG had other things on its mind.

He looked at his phone; he was half-right. It was a text, and it was from ACG, but it had nothing to do with the car. The beacon virus that he’d embedded in ACG’s files had gone off.

The text was a long spool of data and ended with GPS coordinates. His original virus’s instructions had been to install itself onto the hacker’s machine, cover its tracks, and use the host machine’s GPS to phone home. But that hadn’t happened. Instead it had been downloaded and remained dormant ever since. That’s why they’d resorted to staking out the library.

The original virus had been a long shot anyway, and Gibson hadn’t been surprised when it hadn’t gotten a hit. It would have required the subject to open ACG’s files on a machine with an Internet connection. But the hacker had done what Gibson would have done, which was take the downloaded files somewhere safe and look at them on a stand-alone computer.

For it to go off while Tate was locked up confirmed Gibson’s suspicions. His virus couldn’t self-activate. For it to phone home now, someone would have to intentionally connect it to the Internet. It sure as hell wasn’t Kirby Tate. So who? Who had just rung the dinner bell?

Gibson focused his binoculars back on Jenn and Hendricks, who were locked in a heated discussion. Hendricks was pointing angrily at the unit where they had Tate. Jenn had both hands, fingers interlocked, on top of her head in a gesture of disbelief.

Not the text message you were expecting either, was it?

Gibson tried to put the pieces together. If the virus had gone off now, then it meant that another player was involved. Tate had a partner. Someone who knew computers and had activated Gibson’s virus either by mistake or on purpose. His money was on on purpose. But why?